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Improve developer habits by showing time cost of DB queries
This is the first in a series of posts where I share a quick, easy to implement tip that I’ve found useful in my development career
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,888 posts.
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The Idiot's Guide to High Frequency Trading
First, let me say what you read here is going to be wrong in several ways. HFT covers such a wide path of trading that different parties participate or are impacted in different ways. I wanted to put this out there as a starting point . Hopefully the comments will help further educate us all
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Subtly Bad Things Linux May Be Doing To PostgreSQL
In addition to talking about PostgreSQL at LSF/MM and Collab , I also learned a few things about the Linux kernel that I had not known befor...
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Why xkcd-style graphs are important
For most data scientists, a toolkit like scipy/matplotlib or R becomes so familiar that it becomes almost an extension of their own mind. When fleshing out an idea, we will just open up ipython, write a few lines of code, and display the plot on the screen to get …
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ASCII Delimited Text – Not CSV or TAB delimited text
ASCII delimited text solves the problems exporting and importing structured text files and is part of the design of the character set. Unfortunately a lot of people and systems use CSV and other pr…
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PostgreSQL: Jsonb has committed
Great news: PostgreSQL introduced jsonb support, which is real data type with binary storage and indexing ! This work is a confluence of two projects - our hstore and json, which were existed in PostgreSQL for years in somewhat incomplete forms - hstore (10 years old!) implements key-value storage…
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Principles of good data analysis
Good, thorough data analysis is difficult. Throughout my work, I've found it useful to follow these principles in order to ensure quality and consistency.
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Linux's fsync() woes are getting some attention
In two weeks, I'm headed to LSF/MM and the Linux Collaboration Summit , by invitation of some Linux kernel hackers, to discuss how the Linu...
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Analytics at GitHub
In the interest of getting back into writing, I want to break the seal with a simple “what have I been up to and thinking about lately” style post.…
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A Statistical Analysis of All Hacker News Submissions
After downloading all 1,265,114 Hacker News submissions from the official Hacker News API, I gathered a few interesting statistics which show the true impact of Hacker News.
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Reverse-Engineering Xkcd's 'Frequency'
About a week ago, Randall Munroe published Frequency , the 1331st entry in his xkcd webcomic series. Unlike most xkcd comics, it's animated — actually, 5-by-10 grid of animated GIFs. Each describes a scenario (e.g., "one birth," or "someone locks their keys in their care") and blinks at the scenario's purported…
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Results of the SQL Performance Quiz
SQL indexing: 60% don’t know how to get it right
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Making ActiveRecord 2x faster
TL;DR: AdequateRecord is a set of patches that adds cache stuff to make ActiveRecord 2x faster
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Analysis of 419,000 FlapMMO attempts
FlapMMO is a new and popular browser game inspired by Flappy Bird. Unlike Flappy Bird, though, each server has hundreds of other players and you can all see each other. It's lots of fun and I previously posted about hacking FlapMMO for mouse control .
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A Case for Upserts
Some thoughts on why upserts are necessary to write reliable web applications.
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Examining PostgreSQL 9.4 – A first look
PostgreSQL is currently entering its final commit fest. While its still going, which means there could still be more great features to come, we can start to take a look at what you can expect from it now. This release seems to bring a lot of minor increments versus some bigger highlights of previous ones. At the same…
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Apache Spark: The Next Big Data Thing?
Apache Spark is generating quite some buzz right now. Databricks, the company founded to support Spark raised $14M from Andreessen Horowitz, Cloudera has decided to fully support Spark, and others chime in that it's the next big thing. So I thought it's high time I took a look to get an understanding what the whole…
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The best Postgres feature you're not using – CTEs aka WITH clauses
SQL by default isn’t typically friendly to dive into, and especially so if you’re reading someone else’s already created queries. For some reason most people throw out principles we follow in other languages such as commenting and composability just for SQL. I was recently reminded of a key feature in Postgres that…
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Knossos: Redis and Linearizability
A few weeks ago I criticized a proposal by Antirez for a hypothetical linearizable system built on top of Redis WAIT and a strong coordinator. I showed that the coordinator he suggested was physically impossible to build, and that anybody who tried to actually implement that design would run into serious problems. I…